


Riverwash

by hellkitty



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Dubious Consent, F/M, Original Female Character(s) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-13
Updated: 2014-06-13
Packaged: 2018-02-04 11:29:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1777456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Warnings: Consent issues, which would be typical for the time and the relationship; misogynistic attitudes because, uh, Javert; anachronistic anatomical terms because the authentic ones are too laughable even for me.  For Rounds-of-kink, prompt 'historical kink'. I...tried?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Riverwash

  
The fever had taken him, after they'd pulled him from the river. They blamed the fever for how ardently he'd fought them, how he'd struck out, 'raving', they said, something he’d caught on the barricades, his pursuit in the sewers. They'd brought him home, clothing drenched, reeking of muck, of things left too long underwater.  
  
His housekeeper, the good Mme Corinne (for in those days that was the style of address in the city for housekeepers), took the gendarmes to his room, waited while they'd stripped off his soaked clothing, and tucked him into the starched white of his bed, shifting without effort from housekeeper to nurse.  
  
He'd raged at her, but weakly, childishly trying to turn his head away from the spoon as she fed him, but she persisted, as she had always. The Inspector had, as they said in the Prefecture with a wink, 'the Devil's own time' keeping a manservant, keeping any servants, really, except the goodly Madame. They seemed to fit each other, like a dagger and its sheath, something queer in his personality fitting something as queer, as obstinate, in hers. Perhaps it was simply that: both obstinate, dogged, almost stubborn. But while Javert pursued law, she pursued her duties, and who could say which was more thankless?  
  
She was hardly a cheery soul, herself--a quiet, bookish sort, who had no reputation for gossip, no reputation for anything. Else, of course, she would have been dismissed from his service. If she had a vice, it was reading, an uneducated ecumenical taste that devoured Montaigne as eagerly as De Stael, who tried her English on the great Dr Johnson, and the new fangled Byron. But her books were always tucked in her knitting bag, or spread over her knees as she darned the Inspector's stockings (the man was beastly hard on his feet), so it was hardly, the Inspector considered, a vice, though he himself had no time nor taste for fiction and poetry.  
  
"A bath," he croaked, on the third day after his fever, as it broke in great beads of sweat across his brow. His skin seemed ashen, waxy, like a corpse, and Mme Corinne had dropped her darning and gone to fetch the great tin tub from the kitchen, and in the course of the next half hour, filling it with water heated from the Inspector's hob. He watched this all with dull eyes, his mind unreadable, until she'd turned and he'd said, trying to sit up, "I should like my razor."  
  
Mme Corinne set up a tray for his bed--his brush, his razor, a basin of hot water, a clean rag--but the way his hands trembled as he took up the brush and soap, she said, firmly, a tone that brooked no denial, stating silently that she would rather be dismissed from service than refused, "I shall do it."  
  
She had had a husband, Javert thought. Years dead, but she'd had one, and perhaps she'd performed this office for him more than once, because her hands were steady, betraying no nervousness as she guided his chin up, scraping the sharp blade along his throat, where he could feel the febrile-thready pulse of his own heart. She handed him a hand-mirror, finally, a thing he wasn't sure he owned--mirrors were gardens of vanity and he only kept the pier glass by the front door to make sure his uniform was as spotless as it deserved: buttons sharply gleaming brass, boots shining and freshly blacked, and he took a look, for the first time since that fateful night on the barricades, at his own face.  
  
His cheeks were sunken, it seemed, eyes haunted, restless and searching, over cheeks that had an artificial pinkness from the fresh hot water and razor. He barely recognized himself--that was his chin, yes, his nose, aquiline and firm, but the rest might have belonged to a stranger. He looked like a fugitive, he thought, his face bearing the stamp of one long pursued, a creature cowering from right and justice.  
  
He handed the mirror back without a word, legs shifting under the sheets. They'd dressed him in his nightshirt, and after three days of wear and fever, it was creased and soiled and he felt a sudden urge, almost an obsession, to tear the garment off him, as though it was the clothes of the grave.  
  
“Half an hour,” he said, the words thick in his throat, feeling the cool air of the room striking his newly shaven chin.  
  
She nodded, that silent obedience that made her indispensable, gathering up the tray. As she turned to leave, he couldn't help but sense the body under her dress, the shape of the flesh filling out the fabric. She had had a husband. She had had a man. She was no virgin, untouched.  
  
He growled as the door shut behind her, hating his thoughts, hating his helplessness to stop them. Where were they coming from? From what well of evil and sin did they rise? He stripped his nightshirt off in a kind of fury, as though it carried the stink of these evil thoughts with it.  
  
He could smell the Seine on him still, as though the river's foul depths had seeped under his skin, and with it, all those troublesome doubts: Valjean, seemingly a kind man. A hardened criminal, who had chosen mercy. It was as if the world was spinning out of control, things tumbling from where they belonged. The gendarmes might have saved him from the churning cataract of the river, but no one could save him from the sucking gyre of his mind.  
  
Javert flung himself into the tub, hoping the water was still hot enough to scald out these sinful thoughts, to match the heat of the blood that was surging through his veins. He was not an attractive man, though he put no stock in such terms in any case, and he used his body roughly, as a tool for the law. And his body showed it--arms mottled with scars from his days at Toulon and Bicetre, the bodily testimony of the sullen violence of prisoners. A scar on his chest, which one would think as a knife wound--it had been fire-hardened wood, a sliver of bedpost one of the prisoners had saved up for just the right day, just the right revenge. Javert bore the scar and the lesson of it: the convict bore two years' sentence with a double chain. It would be hard to say who came out worse in the bargain.  
  
He plunged his head under the water, feeling it sheet over his hair, taking up the soap and brush and scrubbing at his face, his scalp. If only doubt and despair could be scrubbed from the soul as easily, he thought, as his hair squeaked between his fingers.  
  
The Prefect, he thought, dully. I should go to the Prefecture. Today, shaven, bathed. Mme Corinne will have my uniform prepared. I should show them that I am...what? The same man? He wasn't, and he knew it. Javert had lost something that night after the barricades fell, something that felt worse than the arrogant students who had lost their lives. At least they didn't have to live on, he thought, with the shame, with the aftermath.  
  
No, he castigated himself, as the water cooled around him, such thoughts are cowardice, and I have never been afraid.  
  
A lie, of course, the kind of hyperbole a bruised soul tells itself, trying to gather the scattered fragments of itself together, like a weeping chambermaid and the shards of a dropped milk pitcher. One can repair the pitcher, perhaps, but the milk is lost. But it was something to do, and any reaction of the soul against despair is a movement toward life, a crawling, shaky step toward hope.  
  
His thoughts wandered again, unruly, to Mme Corinne, to the way her bosom swelled over her bodice, the nip of her waist, the way the dress would move on her as she bent or lifted that told that the stays of her undergarments did little to compress her shape. He could feel the memory of her fingers on his chin, his cheek, the cool scrape of the razor at his throat, her hands sure and steady and certain and...almost tender.  
  
She smelled of lilacs, he thought, remembering the way she'd leaned close, the lilac water almost lost in the warm steam of the hot towel she applied to his face. Lilacs and springtime, not the boisterous, showy roses, but a hint of life and something sweet.  
  
A tap at the door--had it been? Yes, the half hour had passed, the water was leaching heat from his body, his skin clammy, cold as a corpse. He should send her away, find his dressing gown.  
  
He should. He didn’t. “Enter,” he said, brusquely, moving to rise, feeling the water sheet off him, lapping against the sides of the tin tub. She had been married, he told himself. She’d seen men naked before.  
  
Mme Corinne was not a pretty woman. In another life, decked in jewels and satins, hair carefully coiffed in the latest styles, she might be beautiful, in a stately, striking way. But pretty, she could never claim. There was something too broad in her mouth, too strong in her chin for the current rosebud fashion of prettiness. But the way her eyes caught his, then fell away, the dawn-like flush spreading over her cheeks, stirred the banked fire within him. “Come here,” he said, stepping out of the tub, feet broad and wet on the carpet. Perhaps he still had a touch of the fever left in him, pushing against the cool water, the cool air of the room. He seemed to flare up, like a flame in oxygen, hot and mindless, wanting only her obedience.  
  
She obeyed, as she always had, taking up his dressing gown to offer it to him, holding it between them like a ward or a charm.  
  
Ineffectual, like all such ‘magics’--he seized her by her shoulders, fingers bunching up the sleeves, pulling her closer, close enough that the robe clung to his damp skin, close enough that his mouth found hers, opened in surprise, with the word ‘Inspector’ on her lips. He had seen a lifetime’s worth of men making sport with whores, in alleyways, under quais, all the dark crannies of a city, little pustules of vice. They’d disgusted him, rutting and boorish, but he felt no better than them now, his hands clutching at her skirts, dragging the fabric up, desperate for a touch of her bare skin. There was something about the sleek sweep of her dark hair into its serviceable bun that offended him, a need to bring disorder to order, to drag her down into the darkness with him. One hand tore at her hair, pins sliding out, until the weight of it took over, tumbling down her back, like strands of silk through his calloused fingers.  
  
She resisted, at first, her own hands dropping the dressing gown to push at his shoulders, but not by much, just enough to fan the flames of this dark fire burning in him higher, just enough that he wanted to hear her plead for her freedom, beg for his non-existent mercy.  
  
One didn’t guard the roughest of prisoners without developing, like a second nature, the skill to handle another’s body, the weight and shift of it. And she was no convict, her body unstrengthened by years in the galleys, mind unused to resistance. It was the work of an instant to spin her around, propel her toward the bed, the bedclothes still rumpled from his three-days-fevered rest. “Refuse me,” he said, even as his hands pushed her down, fighting with the yards of fabric of her skirts. He felt himself throb, a hard knot in his belly quickening, tightening as he bent over her.  
  
“Inspector--” she began, breathless, her lips reddened from the hard kiss, breasts heaving, straining against the confining cloth under her panting breath. The dressing gown had fallen to the ground, and all that was between them were her clothes, a few too-thin layers of fabric to save them both from sin.  
  
He didn’t want to be saved; didn’t deserve it. One hand found bare skin at last, satiny smooth, warm as no cloth could be, and he flung the skirts up, a mass of fabric between their bellies. It was June, the heat of summer setting in, and she wore nothing above her stockings, just a bare expanse of thigh, the dark triangle of hair, inviting and mysterious. He could smell the musk of her from here, matching the odor of lust that seeped from his own body, the sweat not of a diseased body, but a soul sick with need.  
  
“Refuse me,” he repeated, his voice thick, wanting obedience, wanting resistance, just...needing something to push him over the edge, something to give him an excuse.  
  
“...no,” she said, barely a whisper, but whether it was the refusal he’d demanded or a disobedience, no one, not even God, might divine. Her hands and slipped their place on his shoulders, though, coming up to tangle in the dripping wet strands of his hair, and as he brushed a rough thumb over the dark mound at the join of her thighs, she twisted up into him, into the touch.  
  
Like a whore, he thought, faintly, but not, because the whores he’d seen--too many to have any pity left for the species--had been mechanical in their actions, their eyes distant and dead, needing only silver coins for the boatman to separate them from the living. She was not, her grey eyes hot and alive, looking up into his, not without fear, but definitely without loathing.  
  
Something different, then, he thought, and not a whore, and he was something different, too, pushing her pale thighs apart with his knees, the rough hair of his thighs against the firm silk of hers, his cock hard and red as he nosed it blindly between her legs to find a matching heat, and a soft wetness for the hardness of his erection. Had he been another man, a man gentler of spirit or disposition, or at least not so ridden by demons as he was now, he might have entered slowly, careful and savoring.  
  
He was who and what he was, even now, so he drove in, ruthless, plunging his shaft inside her until his hips ground against her. She cried out, that sound of submission and almost pain that he’d craved, an echo from the lash in the galleys, filling him with power and confidence. It felt like heaven, it felt like hell, the rising desire monumental and dangerous, like a molten wave pulling at him, sweeping him down, thundering around his ears--or was that merely his own heartbeat?  
  
She cried out, raising her knees, and he found her ankles locked behind his bare waist, her heels goading him onward, clinging to him like a succubus, like someone riding a violent stallion, wanting only to cling on until safety.  
  
There was no safety here, only a long plunge into lust, and he thrust into her with rough abandon, one hand still tangling in the dark waves of her loose hair that rippled like a halo around her flushed face. Her breasts jogged with each thrust, and he wished she was entirely naked, as bare as he, to see the whole of her, possess the whole of her, but his body refused, demanding he drive into her, relentless, feeling the wetness slick down his cock, over the tops of his thighs, a mute, musky testimony to her own sinful desires.  
  
It came--he came--at last, like a whip cracking across his shoulders, the same white-hot lash of sensation, the same sense of something breaking, something fluid escaping its bonds. He cried out, almost a roar, feral and violent, shuddering under the weight of it, feeling his own hot seed spill inside her in violent throbs like the lash of a storm at sea.  
  
He fell on top of her, sheened with sweat, dampening her bunched skirts, the top of her bodice, his head turned to one side, ribs heaving in great pants, sucking for air like a horse after a race, throat raw from the cry that had torn from deep within him. His whole body seemed alive, on fire, the knot in his belly undoing itself, pouring its tingling heat in long throbbing waves over his senses, blurring out thought. He felt sickened, disgusted by himself, suddenly, the ecstasy souring in his veins, the soft body, which moments ago had seemed an answering softness to his hardness, was a bed of temptations.  
  
He could not blame her--he ought not. He was the master of the house: it was his job, his duty, to keep her free from such intrusions, such assaults to her virtue.  
  
She moved gently, almost timidly, beneath him, one hand brushing a lock of his damp hair back over his shoulder, brushing his ear: a touch far gentler than he deserved. He drew back from her touch, flinching away as though her touch was a branding iron. His member pulled free from her, sudden enough to have him hiss a gasp between his teeth, which he tried to hide by throwing her skirts down over her wanton, bare legs, the stain of their sex on her petticoats, her thighs. Their scents had mingled together, a sort of alchemy, and he was certain that the stink of it would stay on him forever, as though he had replaced the watery depths of the Seine with his own fetid stink.  
  
“Leave me,” he said, pulling his weight off her, watching with lust-dulled eyes as she slipped off the side of the high bed, crouching for a long moment by the tub--picking up her fallen hair pins, he realized, before leaving the room, almost a dash away from him, a wild animal freed from the trap, breaking for freedom. She would yield again if he asked, and he knew he would ask: now that he’d tasted vice, it felt inevitable. He could already feel a parching in his body, craving more, the fluid drying on his cock taunting him with memory and eager promise.  
  
The sound of the door, the metal tongue fitting into the latch, seemed to cut some cord in him, and he slumped back against the stained sheets, feeling the cool air like a castigation on his heated skin, the slowing throb of his cock like a pulse of pure corruption, the heat in his veins like the promise of hell’s own fire.  
  



End file.
